Short for Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multiprogramming System, a general-purpose programming language developed in the late 1960s. MUMPS is similar to other procedural languages developed in this period, such as BASIC, FORTRAN, and C. A MUMPS standard was approved by ANSI in 1977.
Although MUMPS has never achieved the popularity level of other languages such as C and BASIC, there is still an active community of MUMPS developers. Since about 1993, there has been a growing trend to change the name from MUMPS to M or M-Technology.
